I recently needed a quick reCAPTCHA field for a public-facing form that I wanted to protect from bot spam. In the past, I’ve used a Laravel package from the community. However, I went hunting again for different Laravel packages that make setting up Google’s reCAPTCHA even easier than it already is.
If you’re interested in rolling your own, Talevski Igor wrote an excellent article explaining the step-by-step process for setting up a Google ReCaptcha integration with Laravel.
Before I cover the packages I tried out, I wanted to mention that Google released a reCAPTCHA V3 which “returns a score for each request without user friction.” I decided to go with V2 with an explicit reCAPTCHA checkbox, but I plan on looking into trying V3 to see how it works with for my needs.
I tried three different packages, which I will briefly go over:
No Captcha reCaptcha
The first option I tried out is anhskohbo/no-captcha by Nguyen Van Anh. This package has been around since 2014 and is relatively active—at least as productive as needed for the package to ease integrating Google’s reCaptcha.
You provide the reCaptcha site and secret key, and then use the package’s helpers to render out the appropriate HTML to support reCaptcha v2:
{!! NoCaptcha::display() !!}To render the required JS script, you use the following:
{!! NoCaptcha::renderJs() !!}On the server-side, you define the validator as follows to validate the user:
$validate = Validator::make(Input::all(), [ 'g-recaptcha-response' => 'required|captcha']);I am not sure if this package supports v3 of Google’s reCaptcha or not, and I didn’t pay much attention to that since I was using V2 anyway.
greggilbert/recaptcha
greggilbert/recaptcha is no longer maintained by the original developer, and I am not sure if someone else is maintaining this package anymore.
It looks like pull requests opened last year are still opened with not much movement on them. Rolling your own reCAPTCHA isn’t super complicated, so I personally wouldn’t use this package, but I wanted to mention it at least because I’ve used it in the past. Perhaps someone in the community is interested in helping the original maintainer out.
This package doesn’t support reCAPTCHA v3 at the time of writing.
Laravel ReCAPTCHA
Laravel ReCAPTCHA is a simple reCAPTCHA package for Laravel 5 with support for Google reCaptcha v3. At the time of writing, this package doesn’t support auto-discovery, so you have to configure the facade and provider manually. I did send a pull request to add auto-discovery, which might be merged by the time you’re reading this.
I ended up using this package since I eventually plan on trying out reCaptcha V3 and the package also supports skipping validation with a configurable array of IP addresses.
The readme also doesn’t convey that you need to add the reCAPTCHA javascript in the <head> tag, but overall the package made it pretty painless to get the reCAPTCHA validation working.
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